Heat Does Funny Things to a Man's Mind
by Red Molly
Summary: From AndItsOuttaHere's prompt on LJ, Heatwave.  Parts I, II, and  just for you FF readers!  Part III.  Comments welcome!


ONE

Raylan looked up from underneath his ball cap and stuck his hand up to take the brown glass bottle Boyd offered him. "I need gills. You're smart, Boyd. Make me a set of gills so I can breathe."

"You know, me and you might as well be swimmin' for real instead of tryin' to swim through this air."

Had either one of them bothered to get hold of the Weather Service, they would have discovered that today, in Harlan County, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity was vacillating between 70 and 85 percent. But when you're seventeen and school's been out for two weeks, you don't do that kind of thing.

No, you wait until the mosquitoes back off and then you go down and run a couple trot lines and throw a bobber out into the river. You pitch your shirt in the back seat of the truck and go set on the dock too, baking in the leftover heat of the day. And then you just practice breathing. Lord knows you're going to need more of that come judgment day.

Raylan stretched back on the dock, the slats of timber almost burning hot against his back. They left dark red blocks on his already sunburned hide. He tilted his head up just a little bit, took a sip from the beer, and set it down a couple of inches from his ribcage. Boyd was in a similar pose about three feet farther down the dock, and neither one of them felt it worth their while to move.

"I should commence to begin workin' on that reading list," Boyd said out of the blue.

Raylan rolled his eyes and made an articulate, sarcastic, noise.

"Well there _is _some good things on there."

"You're gonna read. In the summertime."

Boyd made an articulate, affirmative noise in the back of his throat and sighed. "Raylan, sometimes I despair of you."

The Givens boy raised one big knuckled hand and waved the comment away.

There was a comfortable silence, and then Boyd had to go and be TALKY again.

"Have you ever read _Shane_?"

"No." Emphatic.

"You should."

Raylan didn't think much of it at the time, as he felt a good yank on his line and started a fight with the smallmouth bass on the other end.

He did think of that statement years later when he was in Nicaragua. He still had no explanation for why he was in a bookstore. It could have been the color of the display. It could have been because it was dark and musty and _cool _inside as opposed to the boiling humidity of the day. Heavy felt hats don't do you much good when it's 'a hunert n' twenty-damn THREE' and he was about to roast alive.

_Shane_ was the only book inside that store that was in English. He bought it, stuck it in his pack, and read it on the way back to Miami. For whatever reason, it took his mind off the happenings for a little bit.

TWO

Salt Lake was in the middle of a heat spike, too, whenever he met Winona. Kentucky accents and women went together like whiskey went in a glass, smooth, artless, and just….it just had to be tacked onto, as he would later say, the most beautiful women he'd ever seen up to that point. Willow slim, eyes large enough to swallow his soul, and about to die in the dry heat of the evening. Normally when the sun dies out West, the heat goes with it because there's no moisture in the air to bear the reminder. The wind sifting down off the surrounding ridges was scalding with a warning.

She swept in through the door like a queen, hopped up on a stool, ordered her a

drink and pulled a long draw down that elegant neck. She sighed, and kinda seemed

to melt down off her heels at that. _All _the smooth operator in Raylan Givens could

manage to do was gawk. He could hear Aunt Helen in the back of his head laughing

herself to tears.

He watched to see if she had friends. There were two. He watched to see how

she tolerated the greasy specimen that sidled up to her halfway through her drink.

The woman never dropped her smile. The ol' boy walked off with his tail tucked.

The friends were red-headed and black haired respectively, and left with a pair of

Salt Lake City's finest on their arms and the woman with the Kentucky accent shook

her head and laughed.

"Now or never, son," he thought to himself.

Helen was _still_ laughing.

Two nights later that hot wind coming down off the ridges brought the promised

thunderstorm. They were in each other's arms by then. Her hotel room. Down on

the ground level, so they could hear the roar of the downpour on the veranda roof.

She used the same shampoo for years, until they stopped making it. To him,

after that, he'd catch a whiff of her hair or a thunderstorm and it would bring him

right back. Even after she married Gary and he tried to drink himself down to what

Boyd would call the pits of despair. Despair? Hell. Hell was where he was.

And then that late August thunderstorm a year after the divorce, and he, in

Miami, watched it rattle the veranda roof from the ground floor lobby and drank

his whiskey.

Helen would have said something wise. Arlo would have handed him a bottle

or ignored him. The thunderstorm rolled on without regard.

THREE

Snow doesn't come but by the grace of God in Harlan County, and if it does, it was only once or twice a year. One year they got almost a foot and a half. It melted off in the space of three days, but not before he and Aunt Helen had built a fort in the front yard and declared war on all passers-by. His mother holed up at the corner of the house where all the snow was sliding off the roof and made a stand. Even with Helen on one side and her boy on the other, Frances Givens could make quite the argument in a snowball fight.

Raylan had never been as cold as he was that day. He had never had quite so much fun. His mama and his Aunt Helen and SNOW and the warmth of the mug of cocoa in his hand made him think that time had stopped.

If he had to pick a spot, now, for time to have frozen up, it would have been right there.

His hands were numb almost, and cold. Rachel handed him a Styrofoam cup full of coffee, and he looked up. Same sensation. Loretta McCready shaking under a blanket, her dark eyes wide with the horror of what had and what had almost gone down. And what hadn't. Art sat next to her, and arm around her shoulder, talking like you would talk to a spooked horse, rattling on about everything in that same calm tone he always used with Faylene or his daughters. Oh girl.

Givens' fingers got loose around the cup and black encroached around the corners of his vision.

If he could pick a spot, now, for time to fast forward, it would be right here.


End file.
